


The Forge Of Worlds

by chocolatecatcupcakecheese



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, F/F, F/M, Grey Wardens, Humor, Loss of Limbs, Mistaken Identity, Modern Character in Thedas, Modern Girl in Thedas, Multi, Music, Musical Instruments, No relation to the old one no siree, The Fade, The NEW Kirkwall Darktown Clinic, believing in things to make them happen, dubious martial arts knowledge, dubious medical knowledge, dubious musical knowledge, emotional feels train, handwavy Fade magic, pretty much a constant wip
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-05-10 02:41:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14728416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolatecatcupcakecheese/pseuds/chocolatecatcupcakecheese
Summary: They expected to attend a nice, safe anime convention in Maryland for a relaxing weekend with their new, shiny cosplays. Instead, sisters Suzume and Yuki Smith fall through some kind of dimensional hellhole into Thedas amid the Kirkwall Rebellion. As if they didn't have enough stress between their respective Master's theses, part-time evil-wrangling, expensive hobbies, and roommates birthed in Jigoku itself! Now they have only half-remembered martial arts lessons, questionable cooking skills, and one (1) solar charger between the two of them. There's no plumbing, no internet, and no proper library to help them survive.Forget saving the world. They'll murder each other, if the constant assumption that they're very green Grey Warden recruits doesn't murder them first.Covers from the end of Dragon Age 2 to the end of Inquisition.





	1. Prologue: The Forge Of Worlds

If you imagine reality as planes, then you can clearly see the sheet of metal I describe.

The Master Smith bends reality to his will in this way. He folds and bends it into shapes to suit his whims. He engraves grooves along which we move, in intricate, spiraling, unknown patterns. Perhaps he adds pieces of other materials, or links the pieces into intricate puzzles of strapping, chain, and layering. He makes a beautiful work of art to his specifications.

Every so often there are mistakes.

The Smith has apprentices. They mold reality as well, with far less finesse than their Master. They bend the planes to their whims, lacking knowledge or power, and fold imperfectly. The imitate their Master eagerly, but the things which they create, they create with flaws.

Sometimes, in fixing a flaw, you make more.

You hit the material, trying to smooth out a ridge, and in doing so, more ripples form. You end with a hole where the material wore too thin, or cracks and breaks where you bent the plane at unsustainable angles. You can patch your mistake, but it will not approach the perfect, pristine beauty of the plane the Master Maker first gave you to work with.

At what point do you throw the piece away and start with more? At what point to you call “Apocalypse,” and throw the broken pieces of Reality in the trash?

Do those tied to the broken plane of Reality have a hope of fixing it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #ThrowThedasInTheTrash2k18 #ThreeYearsNoPosting #SorryNotSorry #CollegeLife
> 
> All my thanks and five hundred tiny hermit crabs to the MCIT Discord for getting me excited about writing again.
> 
> This story is my fun story, my shamelessly self-indulgent, just-to-see-if-I-can-do-it story. OC stories have been my guilty pleasure since forever, so now I’m finally writing one of my own. This is my first time writing first person POV, and is an excuse to experiment with tone and style. I hope you enjoy it!


	2. Two Women Open A Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We meet our intrepid heroes (?) for the first time.

"YUUUUUU-CHAN!" I shouted, slamming her door open. She lifted her head blearily from her pillow. "We're going to KatsuCon today! Come on Yuki! I'm going with or without you, I hope you're packed!" I leapt onto her bed. It creaked ominously under my weight as I bounced in place. "Yuki! Your cosplay is still hanging!" I pointed an accusing finger at the offending item on the closet door. I wobbled precariously as she shifted her feet to kick at my knees. It was weak. Her feet were trapped in her blankets. I wrung my damp hair out on her afghan.

" _Damare! Kutabare! Suzu-temeeee!_  It's half-done because got back from work late!" Yuki snarled, hands searching blindly for something to throw. She found a teddy bear and tossed it at me. I caught it and tossed it back into her face. She made an inarticulate sound of rage, and I grinned. Her hands found a book next. I jumped off the bed, choosing to avoid the more dangerous projectile. Yuki hissed imprecations at me, blearily spitting half-formed death threats. She sounded like a bear emerging from hibernation. "Su-zu-meeeee, you absolute _fuck_ , where's my laptop? I couldn't find it."

"I borrowed it! Get your shit into your suitcase and I'll toss it in."

" _Die in a fire!_  Make me food!" Yuki hissed, full of early morning venom. She slid further into her nest of blankets.

"If I die I can't make you food!" I sang, closing the door behind me. There was a thump against it. Probably a shoe. I heard her rummaging around the closet through the wall when I left the laptop at her door a few minutes later. I knocked twice. "Don't step on it!"

I ran before she could stomp over and open the door. I stood in my bedroom behind my door, giddy with adrenaline from the near miss. I only risked getting punched for my alarm clock act if I was within easy reach. I heard her grumble and close her door again, gently.

I dragged my fully-packed suitcase out of my room and down the ancient, rickety stairs. I left it flat at the foot of the steps for Andrew and Gloria to trip over on their way to food.

Amendment. I left it for Gloria to trip over. Andrew was already in the kitchen, with Jack. Pity. Andrew's reactions were always better.

"The two of you sound so positively energetic this morning!" Jack sang, serving scrambled eggs directly to his boyfriend. While sitting on our dinner table.

"Jack, fucking Jesus Christ. Get your ass off our dinner table. And pay some fucking rent."

"I don't live here."

"Don't take the Lord's name in vain," Andrew interrupted. I ignored him.

"You as good as."

"There's eggs, bacon, and pancakes on the stove." Jack smiled his charismatic smile at me. I frowned, considering the quality of the peace offering. Evil-wrangling didn't give me a lot of hours this past week. Rent was really more important…

"Just take the food as an offering to your heathen gods," Andrew rumbled. I eyed him. He seemed in a good mood. There was an amused twinkle in his eye, if I was reading him right.

I sucked in an irritated breath and let it out. "Alright," I said on the exhale. "Food's better when Jack makes it anyway. Even if he does drive up the water bill and  _use our groceries."_ I directed the last part pointedly at the irritant in question. He ignored me.

I made up two plates. Yuki came clattering and creaking down the stairs. There was a curse and a muffled thud, a thump, and a dragging roll of wheels over tile. Her suitcase meandered past the kitchen doorway and came to rest against the wall. Mine was pushed forcibly to join it. Yuki brushed past, looking like a goddess of vengeance with her hair all mussed. I handed her a plate. She thunked down at the table and started eating. I sighed and pushed Jack's plate out of the way so that I could sit without his ass in my direct view.

There was the companionable, slightly awkward silence of two people eating _at_ a table, and two people canoodling, one of them _on_ the table. I did my best to ignore the disgustingly gooey show of affection and focused on shoving sustenance into my face.

The house creaked around us, its ancient timbers warming with the sun.

There was a crash from upstairs, something like glass or porcelain shattering. Gloria was awake.

"Sorry!" Her voice floated down the stairs. "I broke my offering bowl and dropped my paint! Nothing big."

Yuki looked up in alarm. "Who were you offering to?" she yelled back.

"Janus," the answer floated back. "I'm worried about my transitional training period for my promotion!"

Ugh. She'd likely left paint splattered everywhere. "Must be nice," I snarked. Evil-wrangling had no upward momentum, even after three years. “I wish I got a promotion.”

All of my early-morning vigor left me as I spoke the words. I abandoned my table manners in a fit of pique, suddenly exhausted, and shoved eggs in my mouth in blatant disrespect of everything Obaa-san ever taught me. Beside me, Jack and Andrew yawned in unison, and Yuki swayed in place.

I finished my food and collected Yuki's and my plates. She was listing dangerously, falling asleep again in her chair. "Don't hit your head when you fall out," I said, pushing her roughly back into it. I rinsed the plates and left them in the sink. Yuki reached around me and moved the forks to the side, her movements slow and slothful.

The knuckles she drove into my skull were anything but. I squawked and dodged out of her grip, trying to escape my just comeuppance. I grabbed her bag of unopened medicine from the counter and tossed it at her. She dropped it into her suitcase with a heavy sigh and went upstairs again, slothful once more.

I went to lay on the threadbare sofa in the living room. I could afford a rest. My shit was basically packed.

There was a curse from the direction of the bathroom. "Gloria, your damn _bloody athame_ is in the sink!"

"Sorry! I'll get it in a minute, you just take your shower."

"How about you get it _now?"_

"I'm redrawing my circle!"

Yuki made a truly accurate imitation of an irate bear and started the shower.

I awoke from my doze when the water stopped. At some point, Gloria must have come for her athame and left the door wide open, because the shower had shut off without ever changing timbre at all, and when I used the newly-vacated facilities the athame was gone. The sink was still bloody though.

I made a last minute check for forgotten things while Yuki dressed. Her door was pushed to. I widened the crack and threw a green apple Hi-Chew into her room. As I checked through my room, I heard a sound behind me. It was Gloria.

"You should grab your sword," she said, her voice dreamier than usual. "You're going on a trip. You need to be safe."

"The DC area is kind of fucked," I agreed, running after a rolling can of chicken noodle soup that was escaping across the ancient, uneven floor. "But it wouldn't really leave the car or the hotel room since live weapons aren't allowed in the con."

She was silent for a moment. I stood and looked closely at her. Her irritatingly perfect tawny skin seemed lit from within somehow, and her eyes seemed more golden than brown in the morning sun. "Bring the sword, or bring the staff," she said with finality.

There was something about her demeanor that raised the hair in my arms. I grabbed both, and when I peered out of the doorway with my armful of things she was gone.

Yuki and I met at the bottom of the stairs. I shoved the leather hole puncher and spare rivets into my suitcase with the pliers and spare stainless scales and links, then leaned the old rifle bag with the "magic staves" and my sword against the wall. "Cosplay repair pack is packed," I noted, and shoved the armful of Hi-Chews and soup in with the packaged udon and cereal. She hummed absently in reply.

"We're leaving, see you losers Sunday night!" I shouted. Gloria didn't answer from wherever she was upstairs, and Jack and Andrew were making out on the dinner table. All over the dinner table, actually. Their plates lay forgotten off the the side.

Ugh.

"Don't burn down the house while we're gone, I want my deposit back," I snarked. I looked at Yuki, silently questioning. She picked up the keys, indicating that she'd drive the first long leg. So I shouldered Yuki's suitcase and grabbed the rifle bag and my suitcase in each hand. She opened the door to the foyer. It was dark. I stepped through after her.

There was a strange whooshing noise. I looked behind me as I yanked my suitcase over the threshold. Gloria stood at the top of the stairs, her face fearful and her arm outstretched. I opened my mouth to ask her what was wrong. The door slammed shut between us.

It was dark in the foyer.

It was really dark in the foyer. Weird.

"Suzume?" Yuki asked. Her voice sounded far away.

"I'm here!" I said. "I'm here, why is the foyer so big all of a sudden, I never noticed this!" I rambled. A hand touched me. "Yuki, are you touching me?" I asked, my voice coming out an octave or so higher than I intended.

"Yes, I am," she said. "Did someone cover up the fucking front door window as a prank?" she snarled, yanking my suitcase from me.

"This space," I said. "It doesn't make sense, Yuki." She was silent. "Yuki?"

"I'm right here! I'm thinking. And you're probably right. With the suitcases we should be bumping into the walls."

"Yuki?"

"Suzume?"

"Who did Gloria say she was doing her ritual to when she broke the bowl and dropped her paint?"

"Janice, I think? Honoring her mom or another of her ancestors maybe?"

"I think she said 'Janus,' Yuki. Janus is the Roman god of doors." I spoke the name aloud, and it rang in my head, sticking in my thoughts and repeating endlessly. It felt _right_  to my intuition.

My fucking intuition. Damn it.

A breeze touched my cheek, like someone was breathing close to me. Yuki spoke from the other side. Her voice was smaller than it had been for more than a decade. Her hand reached out and gripped mine. Her palm was sweaty.

”She— Fucking hell. You think Gloria did something _extra_ again?”

I nodded. “Probably.”

Yuki exhaled angrily. “Gloria and her fucking gods and her _fucking_ magic. Once was enough, with the ouija board and the poltergeist.”

”Yeah,” I agreed softly.

"So Gloria opened a door. What door did she open, Suzu?"

I squeezed her hand tightly. "I don't know."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't you just hate it when you fall through dimensions on your way to doing something ACTUALLY fun for the first time in ever?
> 
> Translations:  
> Damare! 黙れ! A very rude way of saying shut up.  
> Kutabare! くたばれ! Drop dead/Go to hell!  
> Teme! テメ Just a rude way of saying “you”, but the lack of respect in referring to someone is an insult all its own in Japanese.  
> My thanks and 500 clicky pens to my sister and the MCIT Discord for being inspirational and positive.


	3. In Darkness, In Between

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our intrepid heroes (?) wander and make surprisingly few witty quips. But that's somewhat to be expected...

We wandered for a long while, searching through the expanse of darkness, calling back and forth to keep track of each other as we tried to spread out to map the breadth of the place which had replaced our foyer. The floor seemed smooth and solid, but no ceiling could be found, and no walls either.

“Marco!” My voice fell flat rather than echoing, lending a weird quality to the place, like being wrapped in blankets.

“Polo!”

“Marcoroni!”

“It’s macaroni, Yuuuki- _baka_!”

After a long time of yelling at each other, Yuki took the rolling suitcase from me, and we held hands to keep track of each other in the dark.

We walked for seemingly endless time, but the time on our cell phones didn't ever change from 8:42 AM, even as the batteries slowly decreased and died. The light from the flashlight and the screen never pierced far enough to see anything but black. The gloom seemed to swallow any light before it touched anything, and something about the way the place seemed to _breathe_ around us discouraged talking. We wandered together in the dark, and I swung our linked hands back and forth to remind myself that I wasn’t alone. I let the sound of Yuki’s breathing on my right comfort me, and tried to ignore the strange wind I could feel intermittently on my left.

I kept finding myself focusing on the other breath. It seems like it’s breathing slowly and steadily down my neck, I thought. Almost like it’s chasing me.

I immediately cursed myself for thinking that way. I whined and pulled Yuki’s hand closer. I didn’t want something in some weird place chasing me.

Yuki’s hand squeezed mine and she started humming, her low contralto soothing in the dark. I tried to harmonize with the meandering tune she made, with varying results.

The sound of our aimless voices in the dark comforted me.

“Suzume?” Yuki spoke after an untold amount of fruitless exploring.

“Yes, Yuki?” I squeezed her hand in mine.

“So if we're here because Gloria messed up some ritual to some god somewhere, if we pray to him again, will he bring us back?” Her voice was hopeful.

I frowned, remembering the stories. “I don't think so.” Those abducted by the gods were never released easily.

Whatever this place was, it was strange. It was quiet, except for us and the wind at my side. We wandered longer, bickering louder and louder as we became more and more weirded out, making noise to cover the sound of the darkness breathing.

“Yuki, what the hot fuck sort of door did you open???”

“I don’t know, Suzu, don’t look at me!”

“Oi! You wouldn’t be able to see if I was looking at you!”

“The fuck I wouldn’t! I don’t need eyes to feel your eyes.”

“If you put your sticky fingers on me to feel my eye I’ll fucking retaliate.”

“Not that kind of feel!” She laughed, and then we both laughed, and the tension we felt dissipated.

“Seriously, though, Yuki, what is this place? How did we get here? Why did we get here?” I paused. “It’s most likely it was something from Gloria’s ritual, judging by the horrified look on her face right before we stepped into the entire fucking Dark Side. I guess she fucked up big time.” We both took a moment to appreciate how monumental of a fuckup it must have been. It felt like hours in this place, and we hadn’t yet found either foyer door.

“We already established that it was Gloria. Easiest explanation and whatever,” Yuki said. “Get to the point of your leading.”

“Right.” I clicked my tongue. “I don’t know much about spells, but intention matters, right? If this was a spell of Gloria’s gone wrong... What were your thoughts when you opened the door?”

She clicked her tongue, and I didn’t need to see her to know she was making _that face_ again, the petulant sidelong under-her-brows glare she’d had mastered from the time she was ambulant. “I was just thinking about going to the con.”

“What about going to the con?”

“I was thinking about maybe meeting a cute Merrill, or maybe a Leliana. Or maybe a particularly cute Maryden, remember the one from last year?”

“The one who had a boyfriend?” I asked, inserting all the dryness I could muster into my voice.

She huffed. “Yeah. That one.”

We walked for a moment in the companionable silence of mutual remembered Gay Pain.

“So you were thinking about meeting cosplayers?” I clarified.

She chuckled. “Not really? I was thinking more abou—”

I waited. She didn’t seem inclined to finish. Her grip on my hand was tight, bruising almost. “Yuki?” I asked. I felt a chill go down my spine as I realized I couldn’t hear my own voice. I said it again, louder. “Yuki?” It was as though my voice never left my mouth. I could hear the ringing in my ears, feel the sensation of air leaving my lips, feel the scratching in my throat as I cleared it and tried again. I made no sound. There was no sound.

Utter and complete silence. I screamed and it made no difference.

I pulled the rifle bag against my leg and tucked it under my arm so I could grip Yuki’s shoulder with my newly freed left hand. I pulled our clasped hands to my chest. Her other hand covered mine, then felt along my shoulder and my neck, up to my face. A stray finger poked a nostril before she found my mouth. I mirrored her action with my left hand. The rifle bag leaned against me unbalanced, slipped forward, and hit her. I felt her right arm jerk against my mouth, but she kept her hands in place. I touched her mouth with my left hand.

I said her name. She said what I guess was mine, and something else. I shook my head. All I heard was silence. I shouted into her hand. She tapped her fingers, and tried to talk.

Silence.

After a while of trying to speak and scream in vain, I pressed my handkerchief blindly into Yuki’s hand. We picked up the stuff again and kept going, hand in hand like children, walking in as straight a line as we could manage.

I sang at the top of my lungs, even as I heard none of it. We walked in complete, utter, deafening silence for another stretch of untold time.

 

* * *

 

I felt a breeze at my left, warm and forceful like a frustrated sigh, and then the world burst into sound.

“–Yellow submarine, the yellow submarine,” I was singing hoarsely, mixed with Yuki’s tired and toneless “–Pepper, you’re a pepper, wouldn’t you like to be a pepper too?” I could hear us both breathing, and hear my blood singing in my ears, normally so quiet as so be unnoticeable, now almost deafening.

We both stopped singing as one. “Yuki,” I whispered. It sounded horribly loud after the absence of sound from before.

“Suzume,” she whispered. “Suzu, I hate it here.”

“Me too.”

We walked and hummed, stupid songs from our childhood, oldies rock, shitty overplayed pop music from the radio. Until I heard something.

“ _–What the hot fuck sort of door did you open???_ ” “ _I don’t know, Suzu, don’t look at me!_ ”

“Oh my god, is that us?” I whimpered. “Yuki, what’s happening?”

“It might be an echo? It sounds exactly like when we were talking earlier.” Her voice was wavery, and far softer than it should have been.

We listened to the echoes of our laughter, and walked faster. My voice sounded higher than I heard it, but Yuki’s was spot on.

“This better not be like that Doctor Who episode,” I said, over the sounds of our good-natured bickering.

“Oh, Jesus. Which one?”

“Midnight. The one where–”

“Oh yeah, _that_ one. I hate that one, with the knocking, and the mocking, and the people being shitty.”

“What, psychological horror not your thing?” I asked, aiming for levity and falling far, far short.

I never got an answer, because it all stopped again. Absolute cessation of sound. Complete silence. It pressed on my ears and crawled down my throat to stifle my breathing and stop my words. It pressed in on me on all sides, near-tangible pressure. It was terrifying.

 

* * *

 

And it kept happening.

We would walk through a ring of sound and an echo of our voices from before, talking and arguing and singing and pleading. We would assure ourselves of our presence, hug each other, speak to hear ourselves speak. And then we would step into silence again. And we would keep walking until we heard more echoes of ourselves.

All in complete and utter darkness.

 

* * *

 

 

“ _Is this just a dream?_ ” an echo of myself wondered in a worn-out voice, as the echo of Yuki sobbed, accompanied by the soothing sound of the two of us breathing. Wind hissed around me, heavy breath on the back of my neck as I walked. _“I can't see anything but I can feel you. I have a sense of self and a purpose and memories so I think we both exist. You think we exist. Right?_ ” The sound of remembered sobs and steady, quick breathing filled the space around us as we walked and walked in search of a door. “ _Yeah, I’m pretty sure we exist. I’m Suzume Smith and you’re Yuki Smith. We’re walking. We were going to a con. Now we're in hell. Jigoku. Purgatorio. Between things. A liminal space. I wonder if we'll meet Chthulhu, or find the underside of the lost city of R'lyeh._ ”

 

* * *

 

Layers of silence.

Layers of sound.

It was nerve-wracking. I’d long-since passed out of a panic attack into straight-up disassociation. I was just walking. I had no clue how much time had passed. I had to get out of this place. I had to get Yuki out of this place. There was a door in. There had to be a door out.

 

* * *

 

I passed into sound again.

“ _What do we do with a drunken whaler, what do we do with a drunken whaler..._ ” An echo of my voice.

Yet something was different. The echoes weren’t of my voice anymore, not completely. There were other voices now, faint, screaming and cursing one another in some language I couldn’t identify, threaded through Yuki’s and my own tuneless humming. The wind was far stronger than before. It pushed me, harder than the gentle push of before. The voices grew louder.

We passed through several more strata of silence and sound. It never got easier, being buffeted by sound and then dropped into silence and then yanked back into sound, disorientation over and over again. What had started as breath on my cheek made itself known as time went on as a gale, pulling us forward, screaming with the voices of some warring people.

“I'm scared,” Yuki whispered. “This is so fucked and I'm so scared.”

“I know,” I said, flinching into her side as the screams of suffering people continued.

“I keep hoping this is a dream,” she whispered.

“Me too,” I said. I pulled her closer, so we were shoulder to shoulder.

After untold time longer, I realized that I could see faint shadows. “Yuki, oh, gods many and merciful,” I breathed. “ _Look_ , Yuki, I can see!” I pointed at shadows, passing near, slightly lighter than the rest of the black space around us. They twisted, fighting and struggling, screaming like the wind surrounding us and killing each other.

“What are they?”

“I don't know. I hope they aren't hostile,” I replied.

I stepped forward into the path of one of the shadows as it spun out of the way of another of its kind, and everything burst into color.

The images I'd stepped into spun in endless dizzying combinations of pain and color and suffering. We stood in a bright, gilded city, filled with shimmering, twisting humanoid creatures, screaming in agony, and tall, beautiful people in equally shimmering, gilded clothes and armor. The streets ran with blood.

“ _The new gods are gone, and the old gods are deaf to our pleas!_ ”

“ _We are alone,_ ” the figures said, and wailed, and tore at their hair and their clothes and each other.

I fell out of the whirl of color, and gasped for breath. “What the fuck was that? A memory?” The images danced behind my eyes and left me blind. Yuki dragged me up to my feet with a bruising grip on my arm.

“I think so. I think we're walking through memories,” she whispered. “It's like stones in a pond, what's the word? Ridges? No...” Yuki subsided into muttering as she tried to find the word. I was content to wait and blink the spots from my eyes. To feel her hand on my arm, to hear her voice in my ear as she ventured to speak again. “Ripples! We heard ourselves from before, but in chronological order, because we're leaving ripples.”

I looked around at the shadows of people, dead people, possibly long dead people if Yuki was right. “So we're leaving echoes like ripples, and whatever happened to these people is too. Only it was much bigger so it's leaving bigger echoes.”

“In all five senses,” she agreed.

“A fine hypothesis. What should we do, then?”

“Well,” she paused, hesitant. “The echoes are coming from somewhere, right? And we haven't met anything else in here...”

“So we go to the echoes?” She nodded, barely discernible in the dim light of the memories. I grinned. “In that case, wanna armor up? They seem a bit mean.” I pointed at a shadow.

She rolled her eyes, but grinned. “I guess? We don't know what we're walking into, and Scadian-style protection is better than no protection.” I tried the light on my cell phone. It was hanging on at 1%. I held it while Yuki got dressed in the armor I'd made for her.

The phone died while she was adjusting the straps on her cuirass, so I tucked it away and we worked by the slim light of the memories around us to put on my armor. Every so often, a memory passed through us, and we were dropped into technicolor memories of the golden city and its desperate warring people.

We finished, put away our plain clothes, and continued on. I felt foolish, but more protected with the leather and steel on my shoulders, even if the pants didn't fit me quite right. We soldiered on through the whirl of memories together, hands linked, our bags lighter now. With her wearing the armor, Yuki's suitcase was light enough that she could hook it over her shoulders like I had mine. I held the rifle bag full of fancy sticks and a sword I didn't know how to use, and she held my other hand with both of hers.

We kept going together.

 

* * *

 

 

The people warred with each other, and stabbed each other over withering plants which knew no sunlight and the rotting carcasses of dead animals. They screamed at each other, and blood filled the streets where once was light and song and color... The past echoed around them, as did their pain. We walked in mute horror, levity forgotten, as the void around us filled with death and desperation. It made our own pain seem minuscule by comparison.

The stretches of empty silence became a relief as the spaces of sound filled with remembered light and color.

 

* * *

 

The breath at my cheek became a screaming gale as we continued on, pushing us forward through the quickening swirl of war and despair and silence.

Eventually, the memories of the city became quieter and quieter. The people were dying of violence and starvation. There was no more food and they were killing each other for the bones of creatures, to gnaw the marrow from them. The people were killing each other for the remaining food, yet some were still eating well. They moved from dancing around bonfires to crouching in corners and alleyways with wild eyes. The murals and mosaics of the city were splattered with blood.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Yuki murmured, patting my back as I was violently sick all over the ghosts of golden cobbled streets. Only bile came up, burning the back of my throat and leaving a bitter taste on my tongue. I spat, trying to remove the taste, trying to forget the image of one woman bent over the body of another, her face and fingers bloody as she chewed and chewed and chewed.

I stood, wiped my mouth on the handkerchief Yuki offered. We kept walking.

 

* * *

 

I spied the shades out of the corner of my eye. They emerged from the gloom almost in full color. This place was lighter now, tinged with sick green light from a giant swirling vortex. The figures twisted, sick with anger and despair, whirling around the swirl of green light. The closer we got, the louder they screamed, to the point where their form leached into the noise they made, a swirling scream of sound and emotion and color.

Yuki and I stood at the edge of the vortex, hand in hand.

“What do we do now?” I asked her, swinging our arms back and forth.

She scowled, studying the swirl of green and screaming. The screams surrounding were so loud that they pushed us in toward it. “Well, we haven’t found anything else here. Do we wanna see if this giant screeching lightshow goes only one way?”

I stared at it, mirroring her concentration. “Not really,” I said, watching one of the shadowy figures dressed in some fancy colorful armor scream at said lightshow. “But it’s the only thing we’ve found and we seem to be heading that way regardless of what we think.” My feet slipped forward another inch toward the green thing.

“Together?” Yuki smiled, genuine but thin with worry.

“As allies!” I shouted. She rolled her eyes.

We gripped each other’s hands tightly and jumped.

We hit the vortex, and I felt pain like I’d never felt before. It felt like I was being ripped apart. All around me were memories, a twisted place with a twisted city inhabited only by angry dead and forgotten things. The screaming was gone, and there was only an endless silence, tearing at me, ripping me apart, pulling pieces of me away from the rest of me. Pulling me away from Yuki.

I screamed into the silence around me, and it echoed. “I won’t let you!”

The vortex kept pulling. I resisted. I willed myself to not forget, to protect my sister. I felt her struggling similarly. The struggle was hopeless.

And then something reached down, through the vortex. It laughed, and I felt its wings curl around us. It gathered us together and _pushed_.

We stretched somehow like taffy, then dripped and fell like a water drop, splattering outward on the surface we landed on. I shivered and gently stretched my limbs as the presence retreated back into the between-place with the screaming. Yuki and I lay intact but shaken, on the floor of a cavernous, shadowed room, lit through broken stained glass windows by the same green light of before.

I looked up at the vortex from which we’d fallen. Where I expected to see green I instead saw a great void of black, dripping like molasses onto a giant carved throne. The strands of darkness fell onto it, staining it black. The void-stuff stretched down the dias, across the tarnished golden hall, up the gilded walls and over the peeling, painted ceiling, out the doors and away. The blackness spread over everything, in grasping tendrils like roots which seemed to writhe and grasp at things when I turned my gaze away.

I staggered to my feet with difficulty, leaning heavily on the rifle bag to stand, and offered my hand to Yuki. She gripped it and stood.

“Where are we now?” I asked, looking around. I stared at the black roots surrounding us, trying to spot them moving.

She stared at a tarnished mural on the wall behind the throne. “Look at that mosaic,” she said, her voice full of quiet urgency. “What does it remind you of?”

I stared at it. “It looks familiar,” I said after a moment’s contemplation, “But I’m not sure from where.”

“It looks like mosiacs in the Temple of Mythal, in Inquisition.” The name Mythal seemed to echo, beyond what range our voices had carried. It spread, and it seemed that other voices took up the call.

_Mythal._

_Mythal._

_Mythal, din’anshiral atish’an._

“What are you saying?” I whispered, shivering in the sudden chill. I felt fear overtaking me again.

“There, Suzu, do you see the sun?” Yuki pointed. “It looks like the symbols for Elgar’naan, called the Eldest of the Sun. He who overthrew his father.”

I stared. “So we’re in a temple for an elven god… an elvhen god, and you were thinking of Dragon Age before we stepped through a door.”

Yuki swallowed. “I think so?”

I grabbed her hand in mine again. “I think we should leave.”

“Why?”

I felt a chill go down my spine as the whispers became louder, as though in answer. _Elgar’naan. Mythal. Elgar’naan._ “The golden city turned black,” I said. “The throne was empty, the magisters came in, the city turned black.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *slurps a tall glass of dripping void juice* *smacks lips* MMmmmmmmGggggGGmmmmmmmmmrrrrrrrMMmmmMMMMMMMM...
> 
> Baka - 馬鹿 - idiot.  
> Din’anshiral - journey of death.  
> Atish’an - peace, peaceful.  
> Mythal, dinan'shiral atishan - Journey peacefully into death, Mythal.
> 
> My thanks and 500 shiny compact discs on strings to steelgrayrain for the grumbly and reluctant yet excellent beta, and to the MCIT discord for being supportive.


	4. Gilded Streets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our intrepid heroes (?) explore the new place they've found themselves in.

_"The golden city turned black," I said. "The throne was empty, the magisters came in, the city turned black."_

 

* * *

 

 

Yuki scoffed and I spent a moment wondering at my own leap of thought. I knew about Dragon Age only what I got from half-finished playthroughs of the games, Yuki’s rambling, and fanfiction. Weird that my brain would toss up that half-forgotten snippet about video game magic-heaven immediately. I tried to examine my thought process leading up to that frankly ominous pronouncement. It was largely intuition, and trying to follow it further was useless. 

It was never good when my intuition bothered to speak up. Good things never followed.

Regardless, the crackpot theory felt right.

I scowled and scuffed my foot over a rune on the floor. The carving flickered blue for a moment like a lightbulb turning on, then glowed steady and dim. I stepped carefully away in case it _shattered_ like a lightbulb. After a moment it dimmed and went out again.

Travel to someplace as ornate and alien as this should have been impossible. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel as though I was dreaming. The coldness of this place was already sinking into me. I could hear the tarnished golden hall creaking around me. The colors of everything were bright, but strange somehow. I felt keenly the feeling between my shoulderblades that comes of something watching.

I looked around, cautiously, as Yuki stepped further away down the length of the room, studying the art on the walls, half-hidden by the strange black roots. They kept seeming to move in my periphery. I focused on her, then unfocused my eyes, letting my peripheral vision widen. The roots writhed, as though blowing along with a gentle breeze. I felt immediately 500% more scared.

”Big yikes,” I said. My quiet pronouncement echoed in the empty hall.

Everything around us was quiet. I remembered a flash of the utter and complete _silence_ of the place before, in the sudden and visceral way one remembers sense-memories. I breathed deeply, tasting the dust and stale air of some untold time, and let myself relax into the sounds of my own breath and Yuki’s muted steps on the root-wrecked marble. I wasn’t in the nothingness anymore. I was out now. We were out now. Out in someplace strange. Out in ruins reminiscent of a _fictional world._  I fought down the insane urge to laugh.

Dragon Age. As if.

But if this _wasn’t_ a horrible hallucination after some massive dissociative experience involving sensory deprivation, then… This place was potentially dangerous. Potentially _extremely_ dangerous.

Oh.

There was a thought. Was I dead? Or maybe in a coma? Maybe the black place before was my brain trying to make sense of being near death.

In any case, this definitely wasn’t the first thing I’d think about to dream of. And it wasn’t the kind of afterlife I’d heard about (though who even knew with gods and kami). And it didn’t explain why Yuki was with me.

If I was in danger and she was with me, did this mean she was in danger too? I felt the little sharp jump of panic bloom back into being in my chest.

Yuki was my little sister. I had to protect her no matter what.

I picked my way over to her, minding my steps in the tangle of black covering everything, and gripped her by the hand. “We should leave immediately,” I said, hearing the panic returning to my voice, feeling it in the heartbeat in my throat and the sweat on my palms. I hated it. I preferred dissociation. _Go back,_  I told my brain silently. It didn’t listen. I sent a prayer to Omoikane-kami. I needed to keep a clear head.

Yuki studied me carefully. “Ah? Why so soon?” She asked. “You’ve gone left again. Explain.”

“Say your wild video game hypothesis is correct. If we’re in Dragon Age because of the door you opened, then that place before,” I gripped her hand tighter as she shuddered in remembrance, “was maybe the Void? A thing with wings pushed us out of the screaming green lightshow, did you feel it?”

Yuki stilled, studying my face intently. “It… laughed,” she murmured. Her eyes were wide.

I didn’t think it laughing was good either. “…So we know from some Codex you were on about a while back that the gods took on dragon forms, right? Like M—“ I cut myself short, remembering the eay the name had echoed as we arrived. “Like Flemythal. And then we find an image of something looking like an elvhen god’s image. And everything is green here,” I realized, putting my finger on what was strange with the colors in this place. “I thought it was my eyes adjusting to color again but everything is green!”

I paused, scratching my head. The wild video game theory was gaining more merit. Ugh. _Fucking intuition._

Yuki blinked and squeezed my hand. “Only fanon,” she declared. I studied a circle of runes and symbols etched along the edge of the floor where it met the wall, the glow of the writing barely visible between the black tendrils. I tried to put my feelings into words which could translate my intuition into logic.

“From the other side, _that,”_  I used our joined hands to gesture at the dripping void, the dripping Void-capital-V-(TM), “looked like a rift. A Fade rift. That by the throne looks like darkness.”

Yuki stilled. Her eyes roamed the room. I saw when she followed how terrible I thought everything was. The realization yanked an audible intake of breath into her lungs. “You can’t be sure about this,” she declared, exhaling shakily. “We may just be dreaming. Maybe the black place was us flatlining. Maybe now we’re stabilized so now we’re dreaming.” She didn’t sound convinced of her own reasoning, and she reached out with her other hand as though to steady me or offer me support.

I opened my mouth, and closed it again. I ruthlessly pushed down my urge to shout and pulled both my hands from hers. “I already thought of that. I sure don’t feel like I’m dreaming or scrolling down Tumblr or lying on the sofa reading a fucking fanfiction right now,” I finally said. “I can feel and taste and smell and see everything. I think… I know, that at least for now, this is our reality. And it looks for all the world like the two things over there are… leaking into one another. And it’s scaring me.”

“So if you’re correct,” she said, positively oozing skepticism, “and this place is dangerous. We leave. What next?”

I cursed myself and the frustrated tears welling up in my eyes. Yuki never shared my strange sense of intuition. She never seemed to get into the kind of trouble I did when she went out.

She didn’t feel the _eyes_ on her?

This didn’t feel like a dream. It felt real. I felt it in all five senses, and a strange certainty as well, borne of my _damn_ intuition. I looked around the hall, focused my gaze on the great, dizzying pattern of inlaid precious stones and gold on the floor at the center of the hall. Tears blurred my vision. The black roots stretching from the dripping black mess of Void seemed to wriggle more when viewed through the fucking water in my eyes.

I just _felt_ that this place was dangerous, and I wanted her to leave with me. I could offer her nothing more concrete than my fear. But her curiosity was piqued and she was beyond stubborn.

I knew somehow with a surety born somewhere deep within me that it _was_ real. What next, indeed? And why did my emotions have to return now, of all times? I breathed through my nose, pushed down the welling hopelessness. “We find a thin place in the Veil and fucking leave this place? We try not to die, whatever that takes?”

“Nice plan,” she said. It sounded sarcastic. Her eyes glimmered, however. I was panicking, and she was on the edge of it. She turned back around and studied the black vines on the wall, affecting nonchalance. I stepped closer, ready to pull her away at the first sign of trouble. Upon closer examination, the black roots looked more liquid than solid. Yuki reached out and touched a tendril.

It curled around her finger and she went completely, utterly still. It took me a few seconds to realize why it looked so wrong. She was no longer breathing.

I grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her back from the wall. The roots growing there swayed with her movement, reaching. She stayed in position, unmoving. I realized with horror that the black was inching up her hand, crawling like a caterpillar as though it were sentient. As though it were hungry, I thought, and cursed myself for thinking that way. I grabbed at her pockets, searching for her handkerchief. I wiped the black off her hand, frantic. It released her with a sick, wet sound, and it curled around my fabric-covered fingers as though to find a way around.

A tendril touched me, and for a moment I knew nothing. I was infinitely small, standing before something unknowable and infinitely hungry. It pulled at me, at my soul. At my entire being. I knew without doubt that I was going to be eaten. Everything was silent again, like it was in the dark place. Like in the Void.

I had to drop it. I had to move. I had to throw the stuff on my hand as far away from me as possible. I needed to move. I needed. Away. Gone. Away, I had to get rid of it, get rid of the nothing, so **hungry** —

“ **_You aren’t ready to eat yet_ ** ,” the presence said, and pushed me away with a flap of its wings.

I flung the piece of Void from my hand as hard as I could. It left my hand easily, with little pinpricks of returning sensation as though it was withdrawing little pins from my skin. The darkness and silence of the Void left again, in a whoosh of light and color and smell and sound and the taste of dust and bile in the back of my throat was overwhelming. I breathed, so fast I choked on it, and the air in my lungs and the heartbeat in my ears were painfully sweet relief. I reached for Yuki and found her reaching back at me.

“Th-the quiet, again, the big wings— Suzu, the... the _quiet,_  the _silence,”_  Yuki wheezed. “I th-think I believe you now. I c-could never think up something like this.” Her tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks.

“Here’s to our newfound traumas about darkness,” I joked weakly. We shuddered, both remembering, and I held her close and petted her hair, a bit sad that I could no longer tuck her under my chin like I could when she was younger. I hated the reminder of the Void as much as she did. Already I could feel the memory of it fading again, my brain walling it off in ways I hadn’t realized I’d even done in the first place.

“Let’s go,” Yuki whispered, after her sobs subsided into the occasional shudder. She took my hand, and led the way toward the towering double doors leading out of the hall. They were slightly ajar, but not enough for us to slip through. Together we pushed at them. It took all of our effort, but finally the carved stone came loose with an ear-grating screech. The green light spilled into the room. I blinked, adjusting, and then gasped.

An entire city lay spread out below us, a tilted wheel laid out in rings surrounding a central building. We stood at the highest point, the edge of one spoke of the wheel. The black vines stretched out the door, down the many, many steps, and out over the city into the distance, where the bits of gilted stone and crystal became indistinguishable from the mass of choking void vines.

A golden city, eaten by black.

The numerous slender arches of the city lay broken and scattered across cracked mosaics and silver cobbles. Fountains spilled their water aimlessly, in ways that sometimes defied gravity entirely. Entire gardens and arboretums lay dead and overgrown with the black of void. Near the edges of the city, entire chunks of towers and blue crystal spires hung in midair, as though time had stopped in the middle of a shockwave shattering outward.

A great building of white stone and dead hanging gardens lay directly at the center. Where everything around it was destroyed and empty, the building itself was untouched. The vines seemed to be absent there, in a circle around the center.

“Look,” I pointed.

Yuki nodded. “The black is gone there.”

“Shall we head there, then?”

“Yes.”

“Plan try not to die is a go then!” I said, full of affected cheer. My voice echoed and echoed off the buildings, entirely too loud. I cringed.

I released Yuki’s hand and wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. I hiked them up, cursing the ineffective waistband I’d sewed, and tucked my hand into the crook of her elbow instead.

She stood, wordless, staring out into the distance at the blackened landscape before us. I tugged her arm and she snapped out of whatever she was caught in. We started walking down the many, many steps.

As we descended, I looked behind us. The great building we had exited was made of grey stone adorned with peeling white paint, and across its facade and the front of its massive doors were plates of golden metal, catching the light and setting the entire building alight like a golden sun. The upper stories of it were full of the same delicate arches of the rest of the city, these carved and inlaid with gold. The corners of the building were flanked by a pair of towering golden statues, one hand raised in benediction, the other with a sword held point down at their feet.

The entire building was rent in half, as though someone had hacked directly through the middle of it like a hot knife through butter. The upper stories floated, bobbing peacefully in place like a leaf on a lake. A head of one of the pointy-eared statues spun in place above its body.

We kept walking. I looked around the edge of the city and noticed six other buildings, all of the same overgrown painted stone, adorned with different motifs, spread at equidistant points around the city. Other temples, perhaps?

The city was clearly once grand. The grace of it was apparent, even as it lay ruined and decaying around us. We walked down wide boulevards, full of empty flowerpots and long-dead trees grown into fantastic shapes. The entire city must have gleamed with green and white and gold. I wondered at the people who built it. Elves, possibly, if my hypothesis was correct. Elves, _probably,_  if the statues and mosaics were representative of the populace.

We stopped to rest at the edge of a fountain. Yuki tried the solar charger we’d packed. It didn’t work. I studied the fountain while she fiddled with it. Water flowed from a waterfall above us into the golden, fluted bowl of it, and bounced off the edges of the pool at angles, thus directing the water back up into liquid fractals before it fell. I looked down into the center of the great fountain and quickly backed away to the edge of the square. The water fell into a jagged hole where the pretty mirrored glass in the center had cracked, and then flowed until it disappeared down some endless distance into green mist and jagged, floating spires of rock.

At length, we reached the no-man’s land at the center of the city. Entire city blocks had been leveled in a quarter mile radius around the white building. A barrier of some kind was barely visible around it at the center of the destruction, prismatic and swirling like a soap bubble.

We stepped closer, somewhat out of options, feeling utterly exhausted. In our walks we'd found no one, alive or dead. The city was utterly empty, except for the gently waving vines of void-stuff, which I didn't trust not to curl over me and strangle me while I slept. There was nowhere to go but forward.

The building loomed above us, paint pristine and pale where everywhere else was decaying. The gardens were dead, but the black vines had not penetrated the barrier.

I poked the barrier with my bag of sticks. The barrier resisted.

It swirled, colors congregating on that one point, then formed a shape like a human.

“Suzu, you absolute fucking-” Yuki shrieked.

“Sorry, I’m sorry, oh fuck-” I shouted back.

We stepped backwards, preparing to run.

The form stepped out of the barrier, a swirl of color which floated swiftly toward us and touched both our foreheads before we could dodge or even blink. Yuki and I both screamed. A sensation of warmth blossomed outward from the point of contact and throughout my body.

The person-shape spoke, a lilting language that I didn’t know, yet somehow understood.

 _Be at peace, you who come without malice. Be welcome, exalted, in the council of the gods._ I felt a wash of emotion rush over me, of comfort and love and… acceptance.

The figure stepped back into the barrier, and the colors dispersed again. The emotions of peace left me in a rush.

I crouched down on the ruined cobbles and put my head between my knees. I tried to calm the heart beating in my throat and breathe normally. At length, I succeeded.

“What the fuck,” Yuki hissed beside me. “Don’t just touch things in weird places.”

I let out a giggle that was only slightly hysterical. I felt proud of my accomplishment at that. “Well, on the bright side, I think if I understood the floating man-thing correctly, we can go inside?” I burbled through the laughter.

“You touch the barrier again then,” Suzume hissed.

I did. My bag of sticks went through.

“Well, would you look at that,” I said. Despite what the man-thing told me, I was still wary. There had to be some kind of catch.

We walked together into the barrier. It felt like a soap bubble, too, the barest hint of surface tension passing lightly over my skin. The gardens were all dead, but the hall was wide, and the stones were pristine white.

We wandered the halls, filled with ancient meeting-rooms and feasting tables surrounded by hundreds of chairs. Ghostly blue fire lit itself along the halls and in the rooms we walked, if we stepped on flickering blue-etched tiles. Pressure plates, I guessed, acting like lightswitches. If my hypothesis was true, then likely utilizing lyrium. The glow and thrum of it was mesmerizing. We found sitting rooms with ancient couches still had settings of teacups with the tell-tale black stains of tea all along the inside, left from being abandoned so long that they completely evaporated. Fruit bowls lay full of dust. At the far end of the building, we found a room with a table of figurines on a map. Decorative swords and antiquated maps clearly painted by hand hung on the walls. I touched one of the maps, and the paper was smooth beneath my fingers. I pulled it down.

“Yuki,” I called, drawing her attention from the table filled with troop movements. “Doesn’t this look like a weird map of Thedas? Or am I tripping?”

She studied it as I laid it out under the flickering lyrium lights illuminating the table. The careful layout of stones and little carved elves fell as I laid the map over them.

“It does look like Thedas,” she agreed. “Only it looks weird here, and here, and here,” She pointed at the west of Tevinter, Southwestern Orlais, the far Anderfels, and the far east of the map.

“Isn’t that supposed to be just ocean?” I asked, pointing at place she’d indicated on the east of the map. It was a massive peninsula, where I thought I remembered a smooth edge.

“Yeah. Land ends at Rivan and Antiva there on Dragon Age maps. And we don’t see as much of the Anderfels on game maps.” She leaned close to the map. “Cities are placed differently on here, too.”

I breathed carefully through my nose. Another tick in the mad Dragon Age hypothesis. I gently started rolling up the map. “Let’s take this with,” I said. “If nothing else, when we find the way back home, I’ll have another pretty map for my wall.”

Yuki nodded and took the roll of map from me. She rummaged around in the suitcase, pulling me off balance, and finally took the map and shoved it in. “Actually. Wanna get the rest of these?” she asked, indicating the other maps on the wall, which seemed almost like blueprints. They outlined the multiple levels of some sprawling buildings.

“If nothing else, they’re cool,” I said. Yuki withdrew the map and laid it back on the table. She pulled down the other maps from the wall and rolled them all up together. She put the roll of papers back in the bag, and then zipped it up.

“Onward?” I asked.

“Ehh,” she said, studying the figures on the table. “Look at this,” she said, pointing to a carving of a little elf lady with hair nearly to the backs of her knees. She was painted in minute detail, bronze skin and black hair, holding a sword pointed out before her, a staff in her other hand planted beside her. “This is a totally lovely girl, 10/10 would ask to the fair and give flowers and pie, 12/10 would take out to eat and stay in to eat.”

I snorted. “Do you want the little elf dolls to play pretend house with, Yu-chan?”

She smirked up at me. “They’re really pretty though. And look at the detail!” She lifted the figurine and pointed to the body. “You can see even the etching on the armor, and it’s painted a different color from the rest too. That’s really small detail work.”

“So, basically, you _do_ want the little elf dolls.”

Yuki nodded. I sighed. “I’ll put them in your suitcase.” I helped her nestle the dolls in her socks at her behest, and we continued on. We explored the rest of the place, working around through all of the rooms until we reached the center chamber. We pushed open the heavy doors with effort from both of us.

The room within was quite plain, a round chamber of white stone and a massive mosaic showing eight pointy-eared figures. There were eight massive thrones, three times as wide and twice as tall as we were, arrayed around the edges of the room. Set before every throne except the last was a giant mirror, quiescent and dark. I recognized the shape of them from sitting behind Yuki’s shoulder as she cussed at a computer.

Eight chairs and seven mirrors sat in the center of an ancient, crumbling city. Here was the catch I'd feared.

“Yuki,” I said. My voice echoed and echoed in the stillness. “I am believing more and more that this is real.”

Eight thrones sat with seven darkened Eluvians.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My thanks and 500 popsicle sticks to the MCIT Discord server for a) distracting me and b) helping me plan out the entire main arc of this fic without actually dying. I never imagined making a plan could be so easy. Sticking to it, though... uh, heheheh. We'll see.
> 
> My apologies to reviewer Linnypants to whom I said, in my bright-eyed and bushy-tailed excitement, that "the next chapter will be out by next week." I lied. I had to drag it up from the depths of hell first and fighting the slavering hordes of demons and depression took a lil bit. I dedicate this chapter to you, Linnypants. I like your jeans.
> 
> Omoikane-kami is the Shinto deity of wisdom and good counsel. She often interceded in disputes among the gods.


	5. Seven Mirrors Darkly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our intrepid heroes (?) talk the talk.

 The room with the Eluvians was filled with disconcerting whispers, lingering on the very edge of hearing. If I tried to focus on them, they faded almost to nothing again, only to return when I became distracted. The mirrors themselves emanated anger and malevolence, visible like heat waves in my periphery. The circular room seemed to spin around me, some dizzy energy lurking in the nonexistent corners of it. My head ached with intrusive thoughts.

_Where is the corner of the circle?_

_Where is the end of everything?_

_Where is the exit in eternity?_

**_Where is the way out?_ **

The mirrors whispered, and the room spun, and I felt something like a gaze on me or a threatening, steering hand between my shoulderblades. Something was watching us. Something was angry. It was nearly tangible.

In perfect unspoken agreement with one another, Yuki and I closed the doors again. Then we spent a half hour blocking it off with desks, side tables, and a few ancient sofas for good measure.

“This was the icing on the layer cake of too much. So. Let’s go sleep on the exact opposite side of the building from this, yes?” I chirped at Yuki with the false sweetness borne of an incumbent meltdown.

She nodded, shooting me worried sidelong glances, and we took one of the sitting rooms to the side of the entrance hall and blocked off the door with a pair of chairs.

We set our suitcases down.

I dropped the bag of useless so-called weapons, then burst into tears.

“Alright, enough the fuck of this! Yuki! I didn’t finish _Inquisition!_ Why are we all up to our necks in ancient elf shit? You couldn’t just drop us in the middle of a nice party somewhere? Why’s it always gotta be so grimdark with you? You said you were thinking about beautiful women! Where the fuck are they?”

Yuki spluttered. “I don’t know, Suzu! I didn’t mean to do whatever I did!”

“You’ve been hanging out with Gloria and dancing in the moonlight in your birthday suit!” I accused.

“I have not! That’s not what we’ve been doing at all! We’ve actually just been meditating and having theological discussions on the plurality of divinity—“

“Yeah, yeah, new age schmoo age. This is a lot of cool shit but there’s so much that can go bad here and I hate all these damn _emotions_ I’m having. This is too stressful. I want off this hellscape! You promised pretty girls! If you can’t give pretty girls, then get me pretty guys!”

“I didn’t promise anything like that! I made no promises!”

I put my head in my hands. “There’s a thing that wants to eat our souls up there, and we’re just gonna wander around the Dragon Age magic dream hell-city until we run out of chicken noodles and ramen and then we’re gonna _die_ . And our bags will be full of sharpies and fake elf ears and if anyone ever finds our corpses they’re gonna think we’re _so_ racist.”

Yuki made a sound between a hiccup and a laugh and sat down heavily beside me. “We’ll figure out something. It’ll turn out alright.”

“You can’t promise that. What if something goes wrong?”

“Then I’ll protect you.” Yuki’s voice was firm.

That sent me into a new wave of uncontrollable sobbing. “I’m the elder sister,” I protested, the words ugly and blubbering. “I’m supposed to protect you.”

“Suzume, you scream at bugs and can’t even muster the courage to smack them. If something needs hitting I can guarantee it’ll be me hitting it.”

I shuddered under the weight of a new and terrible realization and lifted my head. “Yuki,” I moaned. “They have giant spiders here.”

She laughed, a bit hysterically. _”Chikusho!”_ Then she burst into tears, too.

“Yuki?” I asked, alarmed. I scrubbed at my cheeks and gently started patting her down for injuries. “What is it?”

“There’s fucking dragons here, Suzu.”

I wheezed and leaned my forehead on her shoulder. “Oh. We’re fucked.”

“Yeah.”

We sat in mutual silence for a while, appreciating how absolutely terrible everything was. Yuki pulled out a pair of granola bars and we devoured them. I pulled out a can of Sprite and we split it between us, alternating sips. The brush of her fingers against mine was a comfort, when all I wanted was to be hugged and never released again.

After a while, I spoke again. “So if you go out fighting things, and I can’t fight with you, what will I do?”

Yuki shrugged. “Get better at fighting things too? I’ll tank and you can snipe.”

“With what? All we have are two sticks and a sword.”

“Ehh. You did archery club for a bit, yeah Suzu? We’ll get you some arrows.”

“And if we can’t do that?”

“You’ll stay home and cook.”

We both burst into laughter at that. “Ukemochi-kami guide me, but you’d never eat anything edible again. Are you sure you can’t cook _and_ fight, Yu-chan?”

“You’re working me to the bone, Suzu.”

I grinned. “I could get a job.”

“What kind? Teaching history for a place no one here has heard of?” Yuki started stuffing her granola wrapper into the can with vicious force. I set mine within her reach.

“Actually, I was thinking arithmetic or music. Basic math skills were sorely neglected in favor of theology and philosophy, in the Middle Ages.”

“So you’d teach some noble brats how to play a scale and do their multiplication tables? What if Thedas is different? They _do_ have magic here. Their math might be different.”

“If that’s the case then Yu-chan will be the sole breadwinner and tank and I’ll be the support class, making ‘healing tea’ and ‘carrot cake’.” Yuki lost it. I grinned, pleased to make her laugh. The mention of my cooking mishaps always did send her into conniptions.

“Just face it, Yu-chan,” I continued. “You’re the _Yamato Nadeshiko_ here. I’ll just play songs in a tavern somewhere for tips and subsist off of alcohol until I die, likely as a casualty in a bar fight.”

Yuki snorted. “Jesus, that’s dark for you, Suzu.”

I smiled sadly. Everything looked dark for me right now. I didn’t know how to get back home, and the way behind didn’t seem to be it. I removed the blue studded coat and unbuckled my little foam breastplate, leaving me in just the leg armor and my jingly scale tabard. I laid down on the dusty, ancient rug, and pillowed my head on my suitcase. “In that case, we can be traveling minstrels. We’ll earn renown for our ‘original compositions’ and play in some noble’s court somewhere and spend our lives singing Adele songs for him and his fifteen mistresses for the rest of ever.”

Yuki gagged theatrically. “That’s even more terrible.”

I laughed. “We can figure out something not-terrible after we sleep. I feel like this will be the safest place we’ll meet for a while.”

She pulled off her coat and made a little pillow of it. I fell asleep to the sound of her breathing.

 

* * *

 

I sat in my classroom. I was grading papers but I couldn’t find my pen. I was searching for it, to no avail. Even my stash of supplies in the locked drawer was gone. The torrential rain outside was poisonous and green. I needed to get done grading so I could go home before the storm got worse. I sighed and ran my hands through my fringe, massaging my scalp with my fingertips. Where was it? I needed to go home.

Someone knocked on the door. I looked up. There was nothing but blackness through the glass window.

“Who is it?” I called back.

“Open the door, child,” a voice responded. It was deep, male. Not one I knew by sound alone. I fought down a pithy reply at this audacious stranger. I was the teacher, not the student. How rude.

“Who is it?” I repeated.

“It’s me, don’t you know me? You feel like one of mine. You should know me.”

I frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Our _hearts_ are the same, child. That is why you’ll help me. Open the door.” The word echoed strangely, setting my teeth on end and leaving me with multiple impressions— heart, center, essence, soul, power.

Outside, the wind picked up. It whistled through the crack in the old window and caused the timeline poster on the wall to list sideways off of the bulletin board again. I sighed and weaved between the desks, ignoring the voice’s continued coaxing. I picked up the fallen thumbtack and pressed it into a new space on the poster, and tried to make it stick in the disintegrating corkboard. At length, it stayed, and I stepped back.

“You _must_ open the door, child! You share my fire, surely you understand. You are one of mine, and you will help.”

I frowned and walked closer. I placed my palm against the wire-reinforced glass. “What do you mean I share your fire?”

“Enough questions! Simply open the door, sun-child!”

I was struck suddenly by a sense of wrongness. I peered into the darkness beyond my hand. “I don’t think I should,” I said, suddenly unsure.

The entire door rattled as something slammed into it. “Open the door!”

I stumbled back until I tripped over the little recycling bin. I felt along the desk behind me and put it between myself and the door. “No! I won’t!” I shouted, my voice shrill in the sudden silence. My hands shook and I panted, too loud in the sudden absence of noise. I wondered if the rain behind me had stopped but didn’t dare move my gaze from the door.

“Have it your way, child. I will ask the other.”

The world around me grew suddenly light, almost airy, as though a great and heavy presence had lifted itself from the dream and pulled its hand back from between my shoulderblades.

_…The dream?_

I looked outside the window. The rain was green, I saw, but only now comprehended.

The other, the thing had said.

I awoke.

 

* * *

 

I awoke, and I experienced the horrible disorientation of waking up and not knowing how much time had passed. The green light coming in from the windows hadn’t changed at all, and the dearth of other colors after my colorful dream made the world seem flat somehow. Lacking. I shook off a niggling feeling of wrongness at the realization.

I turned to wake Yuki and tell her about my dream.

The space beside me was empty.

_I will ask the other._

Fear filled my entire being and punched the breath from my lungs. I looked around the room. The furniture in front of the door had been moved just enough to allow one person through.

I followed, heart in my throat. Following a horrible hunch, I began the walk back to the room with the thrones and the mirrors. The Veilfires were already lit. Someone had already passed through. I became aware of how loud I jingled, jogging down the hall without Yuki next to me.

 _I will ask the other_. It echoed in my brain, words repeating in time with my steps.

As the doors came into view I broke into a run. The furniture in front of the door was shifted, and the doors were open.

I slipped inside.

Yuki stood, one hand raised to the central mirror of the seven. She murmured, nonsense words which echoed and made the mirrors chime dissonantly as she dragged her hand over the frame. I lunged forward and ripped her hand away.

“What are you doing?” I shouted.

She startled sharply and opened her eyes. “Suzume?” she said, bleary and mussed from sleep. “Why are we here? I thought we were—“

“We were sleeping and I had a bad dream and woke up and you were gone and I came here and you were _touching_ that thing,” I blurted.

Yuki shuddered and began shivering. I led her away from the mirrors. “I had a bad dream, too,” she whispered. The room spun and the mirrors whispered back. The malevolence in the room moved, and I felt it focus on me.

“Well let’s go and discuss it away from here,” I suggested.

We replaced the barricade and walked back to the other end of the building. My limbs shook, tingling with adrenaline. Beside me, Yuki breathed in the deep and steady way of meditation. Her hands were steady despite her shivers as she helped me push the furniture back. I pushed her gently down onto the floor beside her suitcase and sat down across from her, ensuring I sat within her field of vision, not touching but close enough that she could reach out. She wouldn’t want my hands on her when she was like this, I knew.

“Yu-chan. _Imouto._  I’m here,” I said, and placed my hands palm up on my knees.

She reached out, placed her fingertips against my palm, and shook apart.

“It touched me. _He touched me,”_  Yuki sobbed, and burst into tears. The words left her in an order that made little sense in her hysteria. I caught phrases, fire, home, a door? A gate. Grandmother. A hand on her back, pushing. A lock.

“We need to get out,” she said at last. “We need out of this city. There’s too many evil things wanting out.”

I nodded. “Let’s pack up then.”

 

* * *

 

 _Did you receive the guidance you needed from the gods, Exalted?_ The spirit in the barrier materialized before us.

“I suppose,” I said, eying the doors to the hall behind us. “In a way I did.” I learned I needed to get the fuck away.

 _I am glad._ The spirit swirled with color. _Safe travels to you, then, Exalted._ It retreated, sliding back into the barrier.

Yuki stared at the spirit. “Wait,” she said. The spirit paused and reformed, swirling patiently. “What is the passcode for the Eluvians out of this area?”

 _Freedom is come. Now rejoice._ The words echoed with a strange timbre, leaving impressions of peace, shackles broken, relief, a void where something terrible had been. I remembered the voice in my dream doing the same and shuddered. The echo left my hair standing on end and made me want to grit my teeth against the strange dissonance.

Yuki frowned. “Is that English? I don’t think that’s in English. Can you repeat that, slower? Phonetically maybe?”

The spirit had to repeat the passcode three times before we could separate the words from the echoes.

“Na revas sahlin. Melana sulahn’nehn,” Yuki repeated slowly.

 _Good,_ the spirit said, and the word echoed with happiness and approval. My teeth positively ached from it.

“What are you named?” she asked.

_I am Security._

She inclined her head. “Thank you for your help, Security.”

 _You are most welcome. Safe travels, Exalted,_ the spirit replied, and retreated into the barrier, its color leeching back into the dome and returning the prismatic sheen to the silvery surface of it.

We headed in the direction the spirit had indicated the Eluvians lay, ‘Between the temples of Sylaise and Ghilan’nain’. They stood above the rest of the city, lower than Elgar’naan’s temple, but no less grand and no less broken.

We passed large fields, barren and overgrown with black Void roots. We passed beautiful apartments, painted with swirling motifs in green and gold to distinguish each cookie-cutter building from the other. We passed through a large market square, full of shattered and tattered market stalls which boasted dust and sad trinkets that glowed weakly when we passed. We passed quickly. There was no telling what kind of magic lay upon them. We stepped onto a wide avenue at the other end of the square, lined with familiar-looking metal trees, and the boulevard we walked lit at our footsteps with lyrium-bright glyphs beneath our feet. On either side of us rose the great temples Security spoke of. We walked quickly in their looming shadow. Something was watching even now, I felt, and it scared me.

At long last, we reached the mirrors. Two large wolf statues stood guard at the mouth of the boulevard, which opened into a wide square of swirling mosaics in the style of Mythal’s temple, showing eight figures with pointed ears. Around the edges of the square lay seven giant mirrors, tall as the doors on Elgar’naan’s temple had been. Ten people could walk side-by-side through each mirror without needing to squish. What had the elvhen even used them for?

Yuki stepped forward. “Na revas sahlin. Melana sulahn’nehn,” she intoned.

Nothing happened.

“Try it on each mirror individually, maybe?” I suggested. We stepped before each and tried the passphrase. Nothing seemed to work.

The uncertain but persistent feeling of doom between my shoulderblades increased. Something was coming.

“Maybe try it with the feelings?”

Yuki stared as though I’d grown a second head. “Feelings… The feelings Security had when they said the passcode?”

I nodded. It felt important, though I wasn’t sure why.

“Revas is free,” she mused. “Ar lasa mala revas.”

The feeling of doom sharpened suddenly. Something was coming, and it was angry now.

“But what does sulahn’nehn mean?”

I felt the fear rising with every successive moment we stood in the middle of that square. Whatever thing was causing the fear, it was coming _fast._

“Relief!” I blurted. “Relief, joy, the absence of tyranny. You’re free, and you should be glad. _Freedom is come, now rejoice.”_

“Na revas sahlin. Melana sulahn’nehn,” Yuki said. Her voice echoed with the lightness of the realization and made my hair stand on end.

The Eluvian in the center lit up.

“Let’s go,” I said, and pushed her with both hands. “You first. Something’s coming.” I felt it almost breathing down my neck, seething malevolence centered on us.

I reached out and took Yuki’s hand.

As we stepped through the mirror, I heard a dissonant ringing chime, like someone running their finger over the edge of one wineglass while someone simultaneously smashed another. As Yuki pulled me through the mirror’s surface, it _changed_ in sensation, from surface tension kissing my skin to the sharp drag of knives. I screamed, and something shattered around my wrist. I dove through the rest of the way, heedless of the agonizing drag against my body, praying to every god I knew that we wouldn’t be separated.

Something cracked, and I felt the strangest sensation, of being in three places at once- in the blackened city, in a misty grove of trees, and above somehow, looking into endless reflections and refractions of myself, my sister, and distant places: deserts baking for eternities under the sun, forests lacing their branches together like holding hands, mountains hidden in the clouds from mortal eyes, ruins of cracked and floating stone, fields of dancing golden grass and cities of white marble draped with red banners. My mind hurt from it all. There was too much, all arrayed around me in fractals upon fractals upon fractals. So many places, so close and so far. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t stop looking. Everything and everything and _everything ever_ stretched out at my fingertips, and if I could only stare a short while longer, I felt I could understand the pattern of it all.

I fell, and something shattered. The part of me in the city behind shattered, too. The part of me in the mist stretched beyond pain. The part of me above screamed, and stretched back. I slipped as I stretched, reaching in vain for my own distorted hand, my body stretching more and longer like hot taffy. I fought the insane urge to laugh. I tugged again, and prayed to every god I knew. Something leapt at me, gathering up my  errand hand abs it did, tackling me and stretching me further. I snapped, and lost my grip on the misty grove. I fell, a pile of strings with a heavy thing like a stone wrapped in me, and tried in vain to disentangle myself.

I landed, not heavily, but suddenly. I stopped, and lay in stretched pieces across the floor. I breathed deeply. It brought me no relief. I pulled, and dragged the pieces of myself back. It took eternities. Forever and forever and forever, and I breathed, and it did nothing for the pain in my chest, as though something had been ripped from me. I pulled until I wasn’t strings anymore and curled up around the heavy, heavy thing beside me.

For a long while, I rested.

At long last, I lifted my head. It felt strange, far lighter than it should be. I looked around.

In the darkness around me glowed the blue-white light of many, many Eluvians. They stood at all angles to each other, an endless spiral of many mirrors, up and around and below me, all glowing placidly. Hundreds of Eluvians hung in the space around me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I like the number fourteen. Seven mirrors to trap Evanuris, and seven mirrors to different locales in Elvhenan, which we may or may not hear more of later... *writerly cackling*
> 
> Ughhhhh. I spent an hour staring at the wikia for five words. Just five. Here’s the breakdown of the passcode I created with Bioware’s very lacking Elvhen cipher, because I want this bit of work acknowledged lmao:  
> Na (Your? [E.g. ‘Na melana sahlin’ means ‘Your time is come’, “Na din’an sahlin’ means ‘Your death is come’])  
> Revas (freedom)  
> Sahlin (now/ is come)  
> Melana (time/now let [imperative? Now let you?])  
> Sulahn’nehn (rejoice, joy)
> 
> Final meaning is therefore: “Your freedom is come. Now, rejoice.” Ironic, considering the aftermath. RIP Elvhenan Empire. Slow clap for Fen’Harel.  
> Sources: [Elvhen Language wikia](http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Elven_language) ; [Codex: Tracing From Temple Doors](http://dragonage.wikia.com/wiki/Codex_entry:_Tracing_from_Temple_Doors)
> 
> Chikusho! - 畜生！- damn it!  
> Imouto - 妹 - little sister
> 
> Ukemochi-kami is the Shinto goddess of food. She has a very... interesting way of making food. Spitting out fish, and spewing out game animals, and vomiting up rice. Tsukuyomi killed her in disgust and even her dead body became food. Now that's a good meal!
> 
> My thanks and 500 inappropriate sex jokes to the MCIT Discord for being wonderful! No beta this time. I totally know what I'm doing. We post and die like men.


	6. Enter Stage Left

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our intrepid heroes find a way out, only to get threatened with a knife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big thanks to Flowers, Red, and Maya for aggressively giving me love and cheering me onward when I was dying in college hell and weeping intermittently over my google doc.  
> I finally love this chapter! It just took *counts on fingers* half a year and a day. Sorry.

Something in my ribs, but not my ribs, ached. I could breathe, but it never seemed to fill my lungs. I kept inhaling, pulling the breath in and holding it in an attempt to stretch my lungs the rest of the way, to make them fill completely, to fill the _need_ in my chest. I could never breathe in enough. I made myself yawn until I choked from it. The emptiness remained, no matter how many times I inhaled.

I took ten deep breaths. They didn’t help, but I counted them out anyway. I couldn’t let myself disassociate like I’d done again. Not wandering in a strange place full of possibly real dangers. I had to be present. I had to be brave. I sat up, searching for the heavy thing I’d fallen with.

I found my sister, lit in the slim blue light of the mirrors arrayed around us. We’d landed on some kind of platform, made of the same frigid gold metal as the frames of the mirrors.

Yuki lay just out of reach amid our scattered suitcases. I crawled over to her, fear in every beat of my heart, and felt along her neck. Her pulse beat slow but steady there. My fear receded. She was alive. I shook her gently. Her hand went through mine.

My heart stopped beating. Carefully, I touched her again. Solid.

_What the fuck?_

I gently patted at her, testing. The strange wavering, hot sensation of my hand dissipating around hers didn’t happen again. She muttered and slapped at me.

“Come on, Yuki.” I shook her again. “Wake up.” I kept shaking her until she stirred and opened her eyes.

“What?” she asked blearily. She lifted her head. “Where the hell are we? This isn’t the crossroads. Did we- did we fall? I thought we fell.”

I sucked in a shuddering breath and laid my forehead against the ground as my arms went weak and boneless with relief.

“We did fall. And I think this is almost probably definitely Dragon Age,” I informed her, my face pressed into the cool stone floor. “Because creepy temples, and the spirit thing, uh, Security? It looked like Dragon Age spirits. And _I_ had a creepy dream with a green sky, and _you_ had a creepy dream which connected to the creepy mirrors. The creepy mirrors which look like Eluvians. We also have a bunch of tiny elf statues and a map which looks kind of, but not really, like Dragon Age Land. And then we used something which sounded a lot like the elvhen language to open the mirrors, and now there’s a whole lot _more_ mirrors, and I have _no idea how to get back from here.”_

I inhaled sharply, and exhaled and started crying. “Hot women, Yuki,” I sobbed. “I want hot women. And my teddy bear. And my bed. And to not be here. But everything in me tells me that we won’t get back by the way we came.”

Yuki patted my hand and sniffed, scrubbing at her own face with her sleeve. “Hey, it’s okay. Or if it’s not, then it will be. Because we’re together.”

I laughed. “Like a pair of lobsters in a soup pot maybe.”

Yuki rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well. At least we’re lobsters with granola bars and ramen, so we won’t die hungry.”

“Well. As long as we find a way out, that is.” I allowed.

Yuki’s expression took on a haunted cast, and I regretted speaking. I stuffed my cheeks with a bite of granola to stifle any more _wise fucking words_ I might be tempted to share.

I didn’t know how long we’d lay in the floor, but I was ravenous. I gobbled two granola bars and half of a water bottle besides.

Yuki took it upon herself to fill the silence as we ate. “All that you know about Dragon Age is fanfiction and some shit from Inquisition,” she said. “But things got really watered down in that game from Origins. If this shit is real, you gotta know the grimdark.”

Then she launched into a gleeful tirade about spirits, Circles of Magi, the something-some Armada (pirates?), the Chantry, and a guy called Maric who was A-name Lamppost In Winter warrior guy’s dad. (Alaric? Arnold? I forgot and was too embarrassed to ask.) A lot of the tirade went way over my head. I was really more of an FPS gal. All this lore was making my head spin.

Yuki finished by talking about the mage origin, and what we knew about Eluvians from it.

“So you can get blight sickness from it, which is why the Grey Wardens smash them,” she ended.

“The one in the city…”

“Yeah?” Yuki looked directly at me, her blue eyes glittering bluer in the light of a nearby mirror.

“It bit me,” I admitted, hands shaking as the memory of something in me snapping surfaced again. “Like. It stopped working halfway through or something. And now I feel weird.”

Yuki went very still, and the slight crease between her brows deepened. “Well, fuck, maybe you’ll get the chance to be a real Grey Warden instead of a fake, cosplay Grey Warden,” she said, in tones that indicated she was panicking but trying to stop.

I resisted the urge to hug her. It wouldn’t help. She'd just get twitchy and possibly panic more.

“Well,” I said. “If I’m already blighted from touching a mirror, it doesn’t matter if we touch another one.”

Yuki snorted. “Yeah? I guess if it comes down to it we can die a warrior’s death together.”

I was quiet as I gathered up our scattered possessions. I knew we all had to die sometime. I’d just never _understood_ the idea before. It was the furthest thing from a welcome realization.

We set out.

Many of the Eluvians were quiescent, inactive. The passcode from the city didn’t work, and the passcode Yuki remembered from some book didn’t work either. We had to hunt down the few activated mirrors.

Even those didn’t work right.

We seemed to bounce off the Eluvians rather than walking through them. Images viewed on the other side were upside down or backwards. We’d pass through the mirror but never reach the places shown on the other side. We only found ourselves moved to elsewhere in the dark space, stepping out of another Eluvian at new angles to the others.

In places, between the larger and more ornate mirrors, the gilt path disappeared in favor of a bare golden latticework, rendering the walkway all but invisible to the naked eye. It seemed as though we walked on bridges made of nothing at all. The illusion wasn’t helped by the uninhibited glow of mirrors beneath. The paths between the more ornate Eluvians were more the _suggestion_ of floor than an actual floor.

I looked down at the hundreds of mirrors arrayed below me. I wondered how far I would fall if the invisible floor under my feet gave out.

My foot slipped through the path and I shrieked and stumbled back, gripping at the delicate railing of twisted gold metal. It was cool beneath my hot, clammy hands. I breathed, deep controlled breaths like meditation, and tried to think solid thoughts. I thought of tile floors and wood floors and concrete floors, and poked the space in front of me again. It seemed solid.

“You were saying earlier that the Fade was some kind of wish-granting faerie realm?” I commented, adrenaline pushing my heartbeat into my ears and throat. I pushed Yuki behind me and stepped cautiously ahead of her, leading the way down the path to the next open mirror.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “So maybe don’t believe the walkways we’re on don’t exist.” I eyed her over my shoulder. Her hands were fisted at her sides.

“I won’t let you fall,” I assured her, aching to reach out and reassure.

She scoffed, but said nothing else.

As we walked on, over seemingly empty air to mirror after mirror, a sharply flickering light, different from the quiet swirling of the mirrors, came into being in the distance. It grew larger and brighter as we approached. We stepped through mirror after mirror, coming closer and closer. I could only tell that my orientation had changed in the darkness by the placement of the light, an orb blue as the activated Eluvians but twice as bright.

As we walked onward, and Yuki’s lecture on Dragon Age lore subsided, I thought about the circumstances of our arrival.

“So if we got sent here by a god…” I began.

“Yeah?”

I sighed. “We have to find our own way back. And we’ll be changed by the experience.”

Yuki was silent, listening.

“I’ve been avoiding recognizing it, but I just. I knew from the start somehow. My fucking intuition at work. We can’t go back.” I paused, gathering my thoughts into words. “In stories of _kamikakushi,_ the gods always take something. It never ends well for the mortals involved.” I breathed deeply, thinking about how I’d stretched between the Eluvians. Thinking about how my hand went through my sister’s as though I wasn’t all there. Thinking about the new feeling of emptiness in me, as though breathing alone was no longer enough to fill my lungs.

“What—”

I interrupted Yuki before she could fully voice her question, before I lost my nerve. “I think something already changed me,” I admitted, the words leaving me in a rush. They rang true in the way Truth does, echoing in my brain and repeating themselves.

_I think something already changed me._

_Something already changed me._

_Already changed._

Yuki reached out, hesitant, then settled a hand on my shoulder. I stifled the sob that wanted to make its way out. It twisted itself into a helpless laugh and escaped anyway. My touch averse sister was initiating comfort, and not even twitching about it.

The world had truly ended.

“We can’t look back,” I said, when I’d suppressed the tears. “Orpheus looked back and the gods took everything. Lot’s wife looked back, and got smote for her troubles. Whatever that thing is in the darkness, we can’t fight it. We can only run, and find another way home under our own power. Asking another god only invites more trouble and an even greater debt.”

I could only hope that there would be a home to return to. I didn’t want to go home like Rip Van Winkle or Oisín, returning seven or seventy years beyond anything I knew.

At length, we reached the flickering light, set in the center of the array of mirrors. It was a massive, jagged stone, glowing lyrium blue from within. It crackled with energy, setting off fractals of lightning in a halo around it. The air surrounding hummed with energy, a basso thrum which echoed in my chest and vibrated in my bones.

Against my better reasoning, I wanted to _touch_ it. It was mesmerizing. I reached out, hesitant. One of the fractals of lightning touched my finger. I yanked my hand back and examined my fingers. It didn’t hurt. Rather, it tingled where the lightning had touched, a shock of warmth which stretched up my arm and settled somewhere under my sternum.

The stone chimed, high and clear.

I glared at it. It chimed again, and the thrumming intensified. I realized, suddenly, that the light pulsed in time with my heartbeat. The empty feeling in my chest lessened a little.

Ripples of darker blue spread across its surface, like fish darting behind an aquarium glass.

The spot under my sternum flared with sudden heat. A matching pain flared in my head, and I clutched my hands to my face, feeling like someone had driven a white hot poker directly into my forehead. A wave of emotion washed over me. Longing. Loneliness. A far-off place, lost.

_…Ripped from?_

The stone was alive, I realized. It was something large and lonely and it didn’t belong here.

Yuki grabbed my shoulder. Her hand was heavy. She dragged me back, so fast I felt the tingle of vertigo. The heat faded.

I studied the stone, looking for something that might substantiate the leap of intuition. I could find nothing. A sense of unease bloomed within me. I couldn’t keep making decisions off of _weird feelings._ I was going to get myself or my sister killed if I kept this up.

The stone chimed again, and the light stretched outward, spreading down one of the paths leading away.

“I think it wants us to go that way,” Yuki murmured.

“I don’t know if I trust _it,”_ I murmured back, curling my lip and eyeing it sideways.

She raised an eyebrow. “What else can we do, then?”

I rolled my eyes. True.

“Do you get any… weird feelings from it?” I asked, clutching her hand. “Like, does it feel… I don’t know, untrustworthy?”

She eyed me. “Nooo,” she said slowly. “It’s a rock.” She pulled her hand from mine and walked on, in the direction the light had gone.

I stared at her, hoping she was joking. Did _she_ not receive any transmissions from the alien rock? Was she not communicating with the same mothership or whatever the _fuck_ was communicating with _me?_

Maybe it was terrible of me to wish, but I didn’t want to be alone in my craziness.

I sighed heavily as she began walking in the direction the light had gone. My intuition, my _fucking intuition,_ said that was the direction we needed to go.

I hated it. Blindly following my intuition always ended with me meeting strange, creepy people, or running into muggings in progress, or getting lost in churches and temples on Christmas and New Year’s. _Weird things_ happened when I followed my intuition.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted those kinds of unique adventures in what was probably an entirely different world. This was enough of an adventure already.

The Eluvian at the end of the path glowed blue, open and waiting. It was thin and covered in vines. An antelope was carved along the top of the mirror, leaping out of frothy carved waves. Yuki made an excited sound. “This is our way out,” she said, grinning back at me. “I know where this leads.” She stepped through the mirror. I took a steadying breath and followed.

We stumbled out of the mirror in a heap of jingling scales and cracking plastic. I winced at the sudden feeling of looseness in my chest and leapt clumsily over the wooden bar in my path, nearly kicking Yuki in the face. I overbalanced and fell, landing atop my suitcase, which decided enough was enough. The hard plastic shell of it _cracked_. I winced at the noise, and flinched again as a blade buried itself into the floor not an inch from my nose.

I looked up, following the length of the staff to its wielder.

Green tunic. Green eyes. Familiar vallaslin on a face utterly incandescent with rage.

“Who are you,” Merrill snarled, “And why have you used my Eluvian without my invitation?”

I inhaled sharply, my heart kicking into double time, and scrambled backwards off of my poor suitcase. “Uh, I’m Suzume, and that’s Yuki, and we got lost in the freaky mirror world.”

“Tch. Grey Warden,” she spat. “Got lost while smashing some other Eluvian?”

Yuki raised her hands in surrender. “We aren’t actually Grey Wardens!” she yelped. “We’re just wearing the clothes.”

“Yeah, they’re a very pretty blue,” I added, feeling very lightheaded. Yuki glared sidelong at me. I widened my eyes at her and tucked my lips between my teeth. Oops. “Sorry.”

The bladed staff came up between us. There was a pause, and then Merrill reached out with a quick hooking motion and whacked me across the back of my head. I made a stifled sound of pain and clenched my teeth reflexively, then made another sound of pain as I bit my lip. Yuki yelled. My skull went numb and my vision went blurry for a moment before the spread of undecided sensation resolved itself into pain. My mouth filled with the metallic taste of blood.

“Don’t move,” Merrill snarled, the sharp end of her staff aimed at Yuki's throat.

I ran my tongue over the wounded spot in my mouth. “If you’re going to kill me you should just do it,” I said, and my voice came out remarkably smooth, even as some inner part of me began screaming in primal fear. The waves of power emanating from the dainty woman standing over me were heady, a near physical aura of violent promise. “After the day I’ve just had it might even be a relief.”

Merrill’s eyebrows lifted, and she placed the blade of her staff under my chin, lifting my face toward the flickering light of a lantern on a nearby table.

I watched her as her eyes flickered over me. It was a struggle not to look at Yuki, breathing heavily beside me. I knew somehow that this was important. That if I looked away she would kill me.

My heartbeat was loud in my ears as the moment of scrutiny stretched and stretched. “If you’re going to kill me, then kill me,” I said.

Merrill’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. “And them?” She tilted her chin at Yuki.

I took a breath before I answered. “My sister. If I asked you to spare her, would you?”

Merrill grinned, and my heart absolutely stopped from terror, then started up again at even greater speed than before, hammering high in my throat. “Maybe.”

“Then what’s the toll for passing through?” I managed.

Merrill’s grin widened. “You did something _more_ than passing through. Very interesting, though. You broke the connection I forged.” The tip of the blade dug very lightly into my neck, a sharp spot of pain and a slow drip of wetness as it split the skin over my windpipe. “I’ll need to remake that. I don’t suppose you have a crate of raw lyrium?”

I stifled the reflexive urge to shake my head. That would be dangerous in this position. “Uhh. No. Not that I know of,” I said.

Merrill nodded, her grin still in place. It was making me uneasy. “Then you’ll help me to get the materials I need.”

I studied her, hesitant to agree. “And, uh.” I laughed weakly. “How hard will that be?”

She laughed, and my heart stopped again as the aura of violence pressed down around me like a smothering blanket. “If you can hold your own, it shouldn’t be too hard. But don’t worry. If you try to escape or die, I’ll just take your blood and do it myself. Now give me your arm.”

I looked down, cross-eyed, at the blade aimed at my neck, then judged the length of the staff. No way I could defend. I lifted my left arm and prayed she wouldn’t slice my fingers off.

Merrill sliced open the sleeve of my jacket in one quick movement, then ran her blade slowly across the top of my forearm, across the bone below my thumb. I hissed as blood welled up from the gash. She lifted the blade, whispered a string of guttural words, and then there was a flash of heat and light as her… aura pressed against me.

She turned to Yuki and said the same. “Give me your arm.” Yuki complied, her worried gaze stuck on me, and flinched as Merrill sliced her arm. There was another hot flash and a press of… determination… will? And then Merrill smiled.

“A little something to make sure you don’t escape me and renege on repayment,” she said, planting her staff at her feet. “Debts are important things, see? I knew a man who got sent to work in a mine because his were too big. I’d hate to have to drop you in a mine. It’s cold and wet underground, and you’re both quite cute.”

I couldn’t help whatever expression my face made, but apparently it was amusing, because Merrill laughed again. Was that a threat? That sure _sounded_ like a threat.

“Now get out of my house. I have to see a man about a building and some mages, and you’re a distraction I can’t afford. You can leave your things here.” It wasn’t an offer, but an order. I stood unsteadily, wary of getting another knock to the head.

Merrill pushed our things without care into a corner of her house and then manhandled us out the door. Her touch sent unpleasant tingles down my arm, and her grip was scarily strong.

She dragged the top of her staff against her front door, her will pressing against it, and as she finished the rune, a faint sense of confusion… rushed past me, sending a shiver down my spine like the wind from a missed projectile.

The space behind my eyes began to ache, a migraine starting up.

“I’m off to help Hawke,” Merrill said. “If you are still alive at the day’s end, we will _talk.”_

A massive tremor shook the ground. I became aware of a high keening sound in the distance. The wind shifted, swirling in a cyclone around the massive tree in the center of the square behind me, and the sound changed, becoming more clearly audible.

Screams. Screams like I’d never heard before, desperate and fearful.

The wind shifted again, and the clarity of the sound faded.

Merrill began walking away.

“Wait!” Yuki called. “What should we do while you're gone?”

Merrill snorted. “All of Kirkwall is going up in flames. I’m sure you can find something to do.”

She strode off into the smog, dashed up the steps at the far end of the square, and disappeared around a corner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my love and 500 funky flashing disco ducks to the MCIT Discord!


End file.
